They supposedly have 40% higher performance per watt than Intel Xeon

Since the CPU collection designed with the Piledriver architecture will never be complete with just consumer budget/mid-range accelerated processing units (Trinity A-Series APUs) and high-performance FX CPUs (Vishera), AMD has finally launched the third collection.

This third collection is designed for servers and data centers. Bearing the name of Opteron 6300, it is composed of no less than 10 CPUs.

As one can see in the table on the left, there is only one CPU without Turbo Boost technology: the quad-core Opteron 6308. Its base clock is decent though, at 3.5 GHz.

The TDP of the chip (Thermal Design Power) is of 115W, while the price of the unit is $501 / 390-501 Euro. Other specs include L2 cache of 4 MB and L3 cache of 16MB.

Curiously, this is not the cheapest processor, not by a long shot, even though all other Opteron 6300 have at least twice as many cores, plus Turbo Boost (automatic overclocking), up to 16 cores, 8-16 MB L2 cache and TDPs of 85-140W.

The reason is simple enough: the base core frequencies are, on the whole, lower, sometimes by a lot, than that of the 6308, and that goes for the Turbo Frequencies too, with two exceptions: Opteron 6328, (an 8-core 3.2 / 3.8 GHz, 8 MB L2 cache, 16 MB L3 cache and the same 115W TDP) and Opteron 6386 SE (2.6 / 3.5 GHz 16-core).

Enterprise users will have to select the most appropriate chip out of the lot. The Opteron 6308 is good for standard servers, while the 16-core chips are better for parallel tasks, like website mainframes and such, where there is a need to process many incoming and outgoing requests at once.

Overall, AMD claims that its Opteron 6300 series is up to 24% better than 6200 in certain performance tests, as well as up to 40% better in performance per watt compared to previous-generation solutions.

We aren't exactly sure what CPUs AMD is talking about, but there must be at least some shred of substance to that claim if AMD risked making such a comparison.

Cray, Dell, HP and other companies have already decided to use AMD's Opteron 6300 series in existing or new server installations.